After suffering from health problems his entire life and spending more than six years in a wheelchair, Brian Naykki, 39, of Babbitt, Minnesota, finished his first 5K last Friday in 1:04:45. Naykki, who had his right leg amputated from the knee down in 2007, says completing the 5K was the biggest accomplishment of his lifetime.

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“People were cheering, people were high fiving,” Naykki told Runner’s World Newswire. “And I never in my life have really accomplished really anything from start to finish. I’ve always given up. People were always telling me, ‘You can’t do it.’ I was determined, ‘I am going to finish [this].’ That was huge for me.”

Naykki says he has struggled with his weight his entire life.

“I was very obese as a kid, not active at all,” he said. “Pretty much all through school and life, I’ve just been bullied and picked on.”

The taunting and bullying didn’t just come from other kids, Naykki said, it came from family members as well. Though he tried to lose weight, he never made lasting progress, and he turned to food for comfort when things weren't going well.

In 2007, upon having part of his leg amputated due to a MRSA infection, Naykki sank further into depression. He says that while he only had 25 percent of his leg amputated, he allowed it to control 100 percent of his life.

“I got severely depressed and angry because I lost my jobs,” Naykki said. “I couldn’t work because I was always in and out of hospitals. I just lived in my living room and played Xbox all day. I shut out my family, I had nothing to do with them, and I didn’t care about myself. I didn’t bathe for months. I wanted to die.”

The turning point for Naykki came in October of 2013 when his doctor told him he had 10 years to live, at most.

“That was the eye opener,” Naykki said. “I’m a type 2 diabetic, I have one kidney, plus the amputation. I’m like a walking time bomb. And I knew I wouldn’t make it 10 years at all.”

After doing the math and realizing that he wanted to see his kids, who are now 11 and 13, graduate from high school, he made a dramatic lifestyle change.

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He contacted Sean Huddleston, a celebrity trainer on the show Sister Wives, which Naykki’s wife and sister liked to watch, and challenged him.

“I’m like, ‘What can you do with a 450-pound guy with one leg that don’t care about life anymore that plays Xbox?’ And he was like, ‘Send me a bio. Contact me.’ So I wrote this email, he responded back, and was like, ‘You got me. Let’s get to work,’” Naykki said.

According to Naykki, the two corresponded over email, phone, and Facebook, with Huddleston volunteering his services. “This was all out of his heart,’ Naykki said. Naykki realized that working with Huddleston was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, so he wanted to take advantage of it.

Naykki switched over to a mostly vegan diet, began exercising, and the weight began to come off. Since October of 2013, he has gone from an estimated 450 pounds down to his current weight of 295, and he’d like to lose 70 more pounds.

When Naykki first contacted Huddleston, he was still using a wheelchair for mobility, but he began to wonder if he might be able to walk again. With the help of Jim L’Allier at the Hanger Clinic in Duluth, he worked his way into walking with a walker, then a cane, and, in December of 2014, without a cane for the first time since he had his leg amputated.

A couple of accidents—which injured the part of Naykki’s leg that attaches to his prosthesis—limited Naykki’s on-road training leading up to last Friday’s William A. Irvin 5K, run in conjunction with the Grandma’s Marathon—but his workout routine consisted of weight training and swimming a few days each week.

Naykki is already thinking about doing more races, ideally to raise money for research to fight diseases like type 2 diabetes and cancer. And, like many who catch the racing bug, he’s already thinking about how to improve his time.

Naykki’s weight loss and new outlook has allowed him to experience many firsts recently. As a child, he was always too big to ride amusement park rides. Last August, he and his family were invited to the Mall of America so that he could experience riding his first amusement park ride with his children.

Naykki is also planning to visit his childhood home in Ohio for the first time in 13 years. His weight and health had prevented him from traveling, so many of his family members have not met his children.

Naykki’s lifestyle change has strengthened his relationships with his wife and children as well, allowing him to participate more fully in his children's activities and share outdoor time with them. He says that in regaining his health, his self-doubt has always been his worst enemy. Those who have supported him in his journey have helped him see that his mind is tricking him, and that he can do more than he previously thought possible.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re struggling with alcohol, drugs, weight loss, trying to get a job promotion, trying just to make it through the day, get to that finish line,” Naykki said. “I think that was the biggest thing [in finishing the 5K], to really see that finish line. I started tearing up. It was like, ‘I’m going to do this. Wow, I’m going to finish.' That’s the same as my weight loss journey. I’m going to finish this.”

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